On our way out of Stilbaai we stopped at Inverroche Distillery. Inverroche basically means the meeting of water (the Celtic word “inver”) and rock (the French word “roche”), specifically limestone found in the region.

Stilbaai (direct English translation: Still Bay) has hosted some our best holidays, always including good friends and good surfing. We like to stop there whenever we can and take in it’s relaxed beauty and charm. We usually go to Lappiesbaai Restaurant, which overlooks the ocean but this particular day it was closed so we took a walk along the misty beach instead.

We stopped at Ou Meul Bakkery in Riviersonderend on our road trip. It came highly recommended by Chris and Carla and is definitely well worth a visit. We stopped there again on the way back home, for more pies and pastries, it was so good.

We spend most of our time outside of South Africa but, whenever we go home, we are always blown away by it’s beauty. The Western Cape is especially beautiful for me, because of the diversity of the landscape and how quickly you can get from white sandy beaches to tropical forests to fynbos covered mountains or snow capped peaks overlooking perfectly manicured vineyard valleys.

One of the many positives about being back in SA was the opportunity to celebrate love and life with our friends. We had originally declined wedding invitations when we thought that we wouldn’t be in the country but, as soon as we returned, we were quickly welcomed back onto the various guest lists. The first of these celebrations was Anne and Francoin’s wedding. This was a very special one for us because it was a rare occasion where we could see almost all of our nearest and dearest friends under one roof. These days it is hard to get so many good…

I finally got my external hard drive back! That means I can start posting all the good stuff from our 3 month stay in South Africa. The first one I want to begin with is the beautiful home of our friends, Evi and Jochem. They generously allowed us to use it as our own for a big part of our stay in SA. They also trusted us with their three furry children: Jack, Juno and Oscar. Needless to say we totally fell in love with these three characters and it was a particularly hard goodbye for me with Juno 🙁

This is actually a double throwback to January 2013, a morning in Cape Town city, with the Winterbach family. It was especially special because Lesley, Chris’ sister, was in the country and we don’t often get to see her as she is also based overseas now. I had to add this in because we always have such a great time with them – lots of laughter and great conversation. This was just after we left Melody, in Tobago, to go back to Zambia to work for a year and earn more cash to fund the next leg of our sailing journey.

We have a dream… another one. Our dream is to have a farm/piece of land one day. We discovered one particular piece of property near the area that Rufus’ father’s family comes from, the Sandveld. Directly translated it means “Sand Field” and that’s exactly what it is – a large area of sandy ground. A lot of farming takes place in this district, mostly wheat, potatoes and livestock.

If you didn’t read my last post, and you haven’t figured out the title yet, “TTSA” means “Throwback to South Africa”. This one is about Brampton Wines, a restaurant/bar/wine shop in Stellenbosch. With a name like Brampton Wines you would think we went there to drink wine, but no. We had beer. We also olives and Rufus drew on the table. That might sound odd (or pretty normal, if you know Rufus well) but they encourage table art. Each surface is covered in blackboard paint and a huge jar of colourful chalk perched on each table.

We got back to Belize, from South Africa, about 3 weeks ago and during that time, every free moment in between work and travelling, I have been editing photos and drafting posts about our 3 month stay back home. I saved everything to my nice new 1TB external hard drive and, of course, the ONE item I forgot to pack in, when we took our boat Melody to Guatemala last week, was the hard drive…

At the beginning of the year Helen Warwick, deputy editor of Nat Geo Traveller UK, and her husband joined BSV for a honeymoon charter. Rufus and I didn’t run the charter ourselves but when Helen started putting her article together she approached Rachael (our boss’ wife and owner of Absolute Belize, a luxury travel company, who coordinated Helen’s Belizean vacation) and asked if we would submit some of our photos to accompany it, along with another photographer. I wasn’t sure if Helen would choose any of my shots, especially alongside a pro photographer, so it was exciting to see a couple of…